There were multiple reverses of fortune, and odd happenstance, but in the end, Northbrook native Jack Paleczny lost his Jan. 9 match on “Jeopardy” because he got something wrong.
The show, filmed last fall, began with the now-27-year-old law student falling behind, so far that he got into negative territory, while his two opponents surged ahead. He had early difficulty using the buzzer, and then, when he finally got the hang of it, he said that Betsy Ross lived in Boston, not Philadelphia.
“The first one I buzzed in on, I totally beefed it,” Paleczny said.
The returning two-time champion, Joe Bartolomeo, knew the right answer –— or question — and he also knew every other response in that five-part category.
There were a few more missteps.
“It all goes so fast,” Paleczny, now a resident of Chicago’s River North, said. “You blink, and it’s over.”
The tide seemed to turn when Bartolomeo rang in, but didn’t know the name of a 2011 movie in which a lawyer worked out of his car. The third contestant, Blair Moorhead, did remember “The Lincoln Lawyer.” And then came Paleczy’s charge.
He swept a five-question category on geography, his specialty, and responded easily to questions that separate the people who can get on the show from the people who think they can, but just watch on television.
“What is a keloid,” Paleczy said at one point, and that was the right question for an answer about enlarged scars.
When all the ringing-in was done, Paleczy had 14,200 points, Moorhead had 10,600 and Bartolomeo had 8,800.
“It’s anybody’s game,” host Alec Trebek said. And it was. No “runaway,” so Paleczny and the two other contestants had to guess whether they would answer Final Jeopardy correctly and then bet accordingly, so they’d be likely to win if they got it right.
And then came an odd moment. The judges said that a Paleczy response was closer to right than it was to wrong, and so he would get 3,200 more points. That gave him 17,400. He bet 4,000. Moorhead bet 6,802.
She and Bartolomeo got the last question right. Moorhead finished with 17,402. Even if Paleczy had bet nothing, he would have been bested by two points.
Paleczny wound up with $1,000 third-place money, but he said that game contestants don’t worry about cash, or even, to a great extent, who wins.
“It’s really about just getting on the show,” he said.
Final Jeopardy?
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“Calling him a red-headed madman, in 1889 a group of his neighbors signed a petition to ban him from his home in Arles, France.”
If you know who that was, maybe you should play the game, too.
Twitter @IrvLeavitt